William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Guy Shrubsole 2019
Cover images: Science & Society Picture Gallery / Getty
Guy Shrubsole asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008321673
Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008321697
Version: 2019-04-16
Who possesses this landscape?
The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?
– Norman MacCaig
Contents
3 The Establishment: Crown and Church
8 A Property-Owning Democracy?
10 An Agenda for English Land Reform
Appendices: Figures on who owns land
It’s often very difficult to find out who owns land in England. Land ownership remains our oldest, darkest, best-kept secret.
There’s a reason for that: concealing wealth is part and parcel of preserving it. It’s why big estates have high walls, why the law of trespass exists to keep prying commoners like you and me from seeing what the lord of the manor owns – and why the Government’s Land Registry, the official record of land ownership in England and Wales, remains a largely closed book. The geographer Doreen Massey once observed that the secrecy surrounding land ownership was ‘an indication of its political sensitivity’.
Owning land has unique benefits. The inherent scarcity of land means it’s almost always a solid bet for investment. ‘Buy land,’ quipped Mark Twain, ‘they’re not making it anymore.’ Own some land, particularly in a valuable location, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a steady stream of rental income from it – whether by leasing it out for farming, or building flats on it and charging tenants rent.
In fact, a landowner need not do anything to make a profit from their land. ‘Land … is by far the greatest of monopolies,’ raged Winston Churchill in a blistering polemic penned in 1909. Consider, wrote Churchill, ‘the enrichment which comes to the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or at the centre of one of our great cities’. The landowner need only wait while other people work and pay taxes to make the city grow more prosperous: building businesses, installing roads and railways, paying for schools and hospitals and public amenities. ‘All the while,’ Churchill growled, ‘the land monopolist has only to sit still and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes manifold, without either effort or contribution on his part; and that is justice!’
And that’s why land – and who owns it – lies at the heart of the housing crisis. It’s not because bricks and mortar have suddenly become incredibly expensive. It’s because the value of the land itself has gone through the roof. According to the Office for National Statistics, the value of land in the UK has increased fivefold since 1995. Landowners are laughing all the way to the bank: over half of the UK’s